Breeding in HG/SS

I'll admit, I do most of my breeding in my Diamond game still. I have all 493 Pokemon in the PokeDex - if I no longer have a Pokemon, GTS is a friendly one-stop shop. It's also linked to my Pokemon Ranch...if not GTS, my Ranch generally has something (beyond the hundreds of Pokemon I've put on there).

But HeartGold and SoulSilver has a powerful motivator: IV breeding

IV (Inherent Value) stats represent the genetic traits of a Pokemon. The egg receives random IVs to start with, and then starts shuffling in up to 3 random stats from its parents. Sometimes those 3 stats overwrite each other, so it could be as few as only 1 stat from the parents. Oh, sadness.

It still means that if you have parents with good stats, you're more likely in general to have better babies. (Likewise, if the parents have bad stats...let's not go there.) But it was still random on what was passed on, until now.

The way it is now: if you give the parents the correct EV training items (Power Weight, Power Anklet, Power Lens, Power Band, Power Bracer, and Power Belt) that parent WILL pass down that stat.

I recently bred some Pokemon - I wanted a high attack stat, and good speed. The father didn't have very good stats, except for his 31 attack. I gave him the Power Bracer, gave the mother an Everstone (so she'd pass along her Nature,)...and bang. Every single egg resulted in a 31 attack, out of the 24 eggs created. (31 for an IV is the highest you can get - 0 is the lowest.) Out of those eggs, I found one with the right Nature and good Speed.

Again, this trick only works in HG/SS. It probably means I'll be doing more breeding over there, but it's hard to give up my habits - knowing where and how fast it takes to EV train is completely different in HG/SS.